Scargill

Before proceeding be aware that this page contains an unashamed trip down memory lane and some personal views with which not everyone will agree! In 1936, Donald Archer Scargill, son of Alan Scargill (a colliery engineer in Yorkshire), met Marjorie Irene Clazie, daughter of John Burns Clazie (a freelance musician who, when I was a kid lived in North Shields, was retired and held music lessons at home) and in 1946 they were married. Donald was at the time learning the business of the family engineering company "France & Co.", founded in 1886, originally to manufacture amongst other things brass train lanterns, just off the West Road in Newcastle Upon Tyne in Blandford Street.

He soon thereafter left to work as manager of the West-End Welding company in North Shields (Northumberland) for some years before returning to the family business in the early 60s. Donald died in 1982, Marjorie died in 2005. In both cases, funerals were held in Tynemouth crematorium.

I only vaguely know of my father’s interest in motorbikes and his side of the family. Indeed, I believe he left home at an early age to live in Tynemouth with his Aunt Laura. I recall his mother married twice and I’ve seen a photo of his second dad with a superb model merry-go-round which he built himself – and that’s about it. Poor fellow ended up with severe arthritis in his hands which must have made model-building a trial!

On my mother’s side I do know that my grandfather in his later days was part of I think a jazz band and in retirement taught music at his home in Ancroft Avenue in North Shields. I only vaguely remember my grandmother who died when I was very young. Thanks to my grandfather’s interest in gadgets I did manage to keep a tape of her reciting a poem until well into the 1980s. This was on a small reel-to-reel (one of the first Philips stereo machines with a "magic eye") and somehow disappeared in one of our house-moves. My grandfather died when I was in my early teens and apart from his being a very friendly chap about the only thing that stands out was his distinct dislike of the Beatles pop band!!

For my own history, as a child we moved from house to house in North Shields and eventually settled in Tynemouth where my mother lived until recent years. My earliest memory is of being given a present which looked like a toy TV but which in fact simply was a back-lit slide viewer… I THINK I recall the first transmission of the second TV channel but that’s really very hazy. The only other memory of the time is of being moved, in a pram, from one house in North Shields to another on a nice sunny day.

My interests included photography beginning at the age of 11 in the garage I shared with my dad in Tynemouth. The remainder of the garage was dedicated to making model boats and even the odd helicopter, a hobby he shared with many other enthusiasts at the Tynemouth lake where, in the summer, they paraded their machines every weekend to a very enthusiastic if transient audience.

Before leaving school I developed an interest in printing – an old fellow up the road sold my dad an Adana printing press and a load of lead type and off I went printing business cards for fellow school kids. By 16 I started to find electronics interesting but rather than falling into the family business (at which, as a kid I’d learned to type on an old, black mechanical typewriter which used to jam, regularly), my original plan was to be a photographer (I may add one of my relatives, David, managed just that with success I believe, though I don’t hear much from relatives!).

That interest had started in my early teens when I bought a camera from a second-hand store called "Pallisters" in North Shields and figured out how to to take pictures and to process film and prints. Incidentally in case anyone is wondering if I managed to get out much, I also managed to fit in a long-term girlfriend, bowling league and became a dab hand at darts at the Gibraltar Rock pub in Tynemouth.

Somehow, however, at the last moment after some promising interviews, I couldn’t stand the thought of sitting amidst a bunch of chemicals all day in some dingy lab in the middle of sunny down-town Newcastle (a phrase I borrowed from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in – sunny downtown Burbank) and so I took what looked like the easy option and in 1970 I joined the family business as an apprentice and was promptly sent off to college to learn the skills of the metalworker, welder and draughtsman. Turns out it wasn’t that easy an option after all.

From the beginning, jobs included everything from welding, designing adverts, making the tea to learning engineering drawing, accountancy, and general office work… you name it. Oh, and I was the works photographer as well!! Somewhere here you’ll see my first car – no, not a Mercedes – the old works van with a hole in the floor. You could see clearly see the road underneath when driving. For what seemed like years I travelled across to Wales – Wrexham in the old van – a far cry from today’s speedy trips down the M6 – the poor thing could not handle the country hills in anything above second gear.

The company did well and at one point my dad and I had matching number plates to our name – in total we had 124 DON, 224 DON and 384 DON (his first name) and I usually got the runt of the litter.

After a bumpy start with the old van I managed to upgrade to a 3-litre Capri – a purple Capri at that… and to this day I don’t think I’ve had a car that felt more powerful – certainly at the time it beat all-comers. Hobbies at the time included "customising" cars – sadly I can find no photos of a Capri we did up – white – complete with eagle on the front, flames on the sides and the (mandatory at the time) fur-lined interior!

I can remember my first calculator – a large Casio black thing with green glass display – I believe it lasted a couple of months but was no match for the kind of environment I worked in – last I recall it was sailing out of my top pocket and I remember the mess it made as it dropped from several stories up and landed on a factory floor in many bits! That followed by a fanatical interest in computers. At one time or another I bought just about everything from the original Sinclair Mk14, through Spectrum, Apple, Commodore Pet, Nascom, TRS-80 and then moved onto the early CP/M and MDOS machines such as the Exidy Sorcerer before taking the IBM route.

In 1980 I wrote a simple AI program for a magazine called Creative Computing (David H Ahl) and then went on to develop a complete system for designing adventure games, published in Dr Dobbs Journal in November 1981 (see below).

In the middle of one of the worst slumps since World War II, in late 1981 I left the company and formed my own electronics company so that I could act as consultant to a company who were then, with my help, to develop the first ever microcomputer-controlled video "jukebox". Shortly thereafter my dad died of a heart attack – no doubt due to the stress of running a business in a recession with a totally uncooperative union some of who’s members had difficulty thinking past next week’s pay packet.

For someone with a photographic bent you’d think I’d have millions of photos of my youth – unfortunately I was one of those people who liked to experiment with chemicals and so many of the photos "went off" after a while – still – it was fun at the time. The things that did survive were colour slides from the early 70s… lots of them.

The jukebox product was developed in 1982 over months of sleepless nights and got its first demonstration on Tyne Tees TV and provided the mechanism to take myself and my business partner on a series of travels across the world including the world’s Fair in Tokyo, and so then onto Chicago, Paris, Frankfurt and several other, less exotic locations.

In 1984 after travelling to Philadelphia while demonstrating video technology we’d developed, I met and subsequently married Maureen Denise Ridgeway (Maiden surname Flando – father Andrew, of Italian descent, a lawyer in Chicago). Offspring from her previous marriage include Joseph and Elizabeth, both by Maureen’s’ first husband Ronald Ridgeway, and Elizabeth now has 4 children Rory, Holly, Jethro and Francis.

Since the 80’s things have been pretty good despite the current government. We’ve travelled extensively, I spent many years working with business partner Aidan on a variety of electronic innovations many of which made the IT press and one of more interesting products was a speech system for PCs which made front page of PC-World Magazine one month and was featured on their magazine disk for months after that in one form or another.

Electronics lost some of it’s grip on me as the then Conservative government decided to introduce more regulations to the point where, had they been around when Clive Sinclair first started, he’d have never gotten off the ground. The current government has compounded things to the point where from my perspective, running an expanding business no longer figures in my lifestyle. Developing software is still to some extent one of the last places you can enjoy the freedom to learn and innovate without excess bureaucracy and that’s where I am right now, still very much enjoying learning – including science. All this took me to starting to work on websites.  For the technical as well as developing my own cms and other web tools, I’m into asp, asp.net, ajax, javascript, c,vb, Wordpress, Joomla, etc.